Sunday, June 18, 2017

As a foremost expert in weird right-wing pathologies (if a terriblepredictor of election results), I think it's useful to present friends and fellow travelers a taxonomy of Trump support on the internet. These categories include areas of considerable overlap, and are not intended to be comprehensive, but they should provide a useful starting point to understanding the strange world of #MAGA.The Literal ChildDriving insecurity: hormonal rage

In the not-too-distant past, rambunctious, mostly male youths would have used the internet mainly to surreptitiously download illicit pictures using their parents' AOL dial-up password after bedtime. The ready availability of pornography, however, has led more kids to pursue activities like trolling, which has existed as long as the internet but is particularly enticing to aimless under 18s whose brains are not fully developed and haven't learned how to interact with girls yet. In their quest for individuality, precocious teens learn to sublimate their identity to that of their 4chan or Reddit board, to be relentlessly irritating and shocking, and to seek attention from older, more ideological sad sacks with higher social capital and popular YouTube channels. It's like Freaks and Geeks for racism and misogyny.

Now, you're not alt-right. (idk, maybe you are, why are you on this blog?) You're accepting and want to believe in the best in people. You think that one alt-right twitter chick has taken it too far, and maybe you even shared Jana Riess' piece about how terrible she is. That's fine. She is terrible, and I think a lot of us can agree on that, but that's not why I'm here today.

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Inspired by late-night discussions in college and all the times we thought, "Man, I should write about this somewhere," a blog on life, love, history, philosophy, culture, religion and funny image captions.